What is Metaphysical Naturalism?

[subsymbolic]

[quote=""BWE""]

I'm not a metaphysical naturalist just because I posted in this thread. I'm not one even if I didn't post in this thread.

I totally get your point that whatever I say is subjective to me, and that in order to be as objective as possible, my opinion that the sun will rise tomorrow cannot be a fact before it rises. Things must occur sequentially if they are to occur at all. Causation is paramount. That there can be no laws of physics without first having a valid meta-physics

I got it, thank you.

What can one say about Godel? Moo?

As much as Hofstadter gets a bad rap these days, the weird recursiveness of self reference in systems of pure logic (coding/decoding) is a thing. And, while there are formal axiomatic systems which avoid godel incompleteness, the issue of self reference can't escape the trap.

If there is a place for mystical approaches to ontologies, that's not a bad place to start. That plus the actual relativity of time. So, while mu may seem like a joke there, I would suggest that it might be more apt than we accept at first glance.

I think that's about where Max Tegmark comes in.

Aunt Hillary supernatural? The horror.

Well, that's a really good example actually. The key to any systems view is the point that the whole is different than the sum of its parts. So, if there are wholes that don't make the cut based on logic that applies to the parts, we have a substantial problem with all science that isn't physics. Which might go a long way towards explaining the fundamentalist view of physics as truth and as reality. Aunt Hillary isn't a particularly far fetched metaphor. Especially considering what it is a metaphor for, so to speak.[/QUOTE]

Or physics has a real problem if it is to be considered that arbiter of reality.
I picked the example quite deliberately.

Here's a quick vade mecum for those unfamiliar:

http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/course ... dsi11.html

The B/T argument makes a step Hofstadter didn't make, demonstrating that some tasks performed using logic or maths at the agent level are systematically irreducible to the 'ant' level or below. This can be seen clearly by imagining Laplace's demon trying to predict the behavior of an agent that has decided to try to solve B/T and turn left if there are two balls and right if there is only one. Given all the physical information available and using the laws of physics Laplace will always predict right. The agent, using logic, will always turn right. In other words, that's a nice tidy and easy to grasp proof of Davidson's anomalous monism.

[Grendel]

The vid. You've made a mistake. I said levels not layers. Levels of thought, not matter.

Your presumption that I am a naive blundering amateur. So the video was meant to show me how crass I was in blundering around in the reasoned logic of an expert. How polite and indulgent you've been with me so far.

How do you know what my qualifications are, and can you list them? And if they turned out to be officially recognised as higher than yours would you then be blundering in my dept? And would you retract your post then? But they couldn't be as many and as vast as yours. And I couldn't have written the amount of treatises you have could I?

I'm a monist and hold that there is only one sort of stuff that can be arranged in some pretty astonishing ways

You know nothing about fundamental matter or how it interacts. You just act like an alpha monkey under threat. All you've got is rhetoric and belittlement.

No thread you're in is productive, ever.

[plebian]

[quote=""subsymbolic""]

The laws of physics? Am I right?

So you’d use the laws of physics to decide what the laws of physics are? Will that be before or after you learn to fly by grasping your feet and pulling upwards firmly.

Galileo noted that the physics of his day was full of nonsense. So he boldly threw out all physics of his day and started investigating physics from scratch, establishing physics on sound observations.. This is how one does physics. By observation and experiment.

Just sayin'......

Except that the claim is absolute nonsense. There were dozens of systems in play, Copernicus was building on Peuerbach and indeed the Ptolemaic system, as were others: Brahe, Kepler, Bar and Regiomontanus. Kuhn painfully and illegitimately oversimplified a situation that was described so much more elegantly by Feyerabend. The idea of Copernicus as a lone genius turning the world upside down doesn't fit the historical, scientific or philosophical facts. Even if he wasn't just one of many working through an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process, the fact is that he wasn't investigating physics from scratch, he was putting forward a slightly different model of celestial mechanics using perfectly traditional tools combined with the increased accuracy made possible by better timekeeping and telescopes.

Apart from that...[/QUOTE]

Copernicus had telescopes?

ETA:

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance- and Reformation-era mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe, ... Wikipedia
Born: February 19, 1473, Toruń, Poland
Died: May 24, 1543, Frombork, Poland

The telescope is one of humankind's most important inventions. The simple device that made far away things look near gave observers a new perspective. When curious men pointed the spyglass toward the sky, our view of Earth and our place in the universe changed forever.

But who invented the telescope? The answer remains a mystery today. It is highly probable that as glassmaking and lens-grinding techniques improved in the late 1500s, someone held up two lenses and discovered what they could do.

The first person to apply for a patent for a telescope was a Dutch eyeglass maker named Hans Lippershey (or Lipperhey). In 1608, Lippershey tried to lay claim on a device with three-times magnification. His telescope had a concave eyepiece aligned with a convex objective lens. One story goes that he got the idea for his design after observing two children in his shop holding up two lenses that made a distant weather vane appear close. Others charged at the time that he stole the design from another eyeglass maker, Zacharias Jansen.

Jansen and Lippershey lived in the same town and both worked on making optical instruments. Scholars generally argue, however, that there is no real evidence that Lippershey did not develop his telescope independently. Lippershey, therefore, gets the credit for the telescope, because of the patent application, while Jansen is credited with inventing the compound microscope. Both appear to have contributed to the development of both instruments.

Compounding the confusion, yet another Dutchman, Jacob Metius, applied for a patent for a telescope a few weeks after Lippershey. The government of the Netherlands eventually turned down both applications because of the counterclaims. Also, officials said, the device was easy to reproduce, making it difficult to patent. In the end, Metius got a small reward, but the government paid Lippershey a handsome fee to make copies of his telescope.

Enter Galileo

In 1609, Galileo Galilei heard about the "Dutch perspective glasses" and within days had designed one of his own — without ever seeing one. He made some improvements on his initial design and presented his device to the Venetian Senate. The Senate, in turn, set him up for life as a lecturer at the University of Padua and doubled his salary, according to Stillman Drake in his book "Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography" (Courier Dover Publications, 2003).


Galileo was the first to point a telescope skyward. He was able to make out mountains and craters on the moon, as well as a ribbon of diffuse light arching across the sky — the Milky Way. He also discovered the sun had sunspots, and Jupiter had its own set of moons.

https://www.space.com/21950-who-invente ... scope.html

[subsymbolic]

The vid. You've made a mistake. I said levels not layers. Levels of thought, not matter.

Sure:

There you go. You're almost there. Drop down another level or two and you'll

No it’s ok, you can be king of all the levels below monism.

Your presumption that I am a naive blundering amateur.

Yup.

So the video was meant to show me how crass I was in blundering around in the reasoned logic of an expert. How polite and indulgent you've been with me so far.

Nope, it is meant to show how it feels when being told how it is by naive blundering amateurs. I'm not sure anyone would call me polite and tolerant here.

How do you know what my qualifications are, and can you list them? And if they turned out to be officially recognised as higher than yours would you then be blundering in my dept? And would you retract your post then? But they couldn't be as many and as vast as yours. And I couldn't have written the amount of treatises you have could I?

I don't need to know your qualifications. I can see what you write.

I'm a monist and hold that there is only one sort of stuff that can be arranged in some pretty astonishing ways

You know nothing about fundamental matter or how it interacts.

It's certainly not my field of expertise. Or yours. However what's that got to do with monism, which is a metaphysical position.

You just act like an alpha monkey under threat. All you've got is rhetoric and belittlement.

Nah, I just get pissed off with bullshit and sometimes that is more obvious than other times. I appreciate and value the things you do well, but philosophy, especially of science isn't one of them.

No thread you're in is productive, ever.

Are you in a position to judge that?

[plebian]

[quote=""Grendel""]The vid. You've made a mistake. I said levels not layers. Levels of thought, not matter.

Your presumption that I am a naive blundering amateur. So the video was meant to show me how crass I was in blundering around in the reasoned logic of an expert. How polite and indulgent you've been with me so far.

How do you know what my qualifications are, and can you list them? And if they turned out to be officially recognised as higher than yours would you then be blundering in my dept? And would you retract your post then? But they couldn't be as many and as vast as yours. And I couldn't have written the amount of treatises you have could I?

I'm a monist and hold that there is only one sort of stuff that can be arranged in some pretty astonishing ways

You know nothing about fundamental matter or how it interacts. You just act like an alpha monkey under threat. All you've got is rhetoric and belittlement.

No thread you're in is productive, ever.[/quote]
Hmm. I don't think that's relevant here. There is an interesting question of just how far is physics capable of being an arbiter of metaphysics and where does that capacity end? I think it's pretty clear that physics is not a good delineator but why not? In my view because we make words which reference things which appear to have a permanence they do not intrinsically actually have. This is kind of close to what grendel was saying with his causality argument referenced above by BWE and his question, "what are we keeping" from physics seems pertinent since field theories are not as useful as billiard ball theories in most applications.

[subsymbolic]

[quote=""plebian""]

So you’d use the laws of physics to decide what the laws of physics are? Will that be before or after you learn to fly by grasping your feet and pulling upwards firmly.

Galileo noted that the physics of his day was full of nonsense. So he boldly threw out all physics of his day and started investigating physics from scratch, establishing physics on sound observations.. This is how one does physics. By observation and experiment.

Just sayin'......

Except that the claim is absolute nonsense. There were dozens of systems in play, Copernicus was building on Peuerbach and indeed the Ptolemaic system, as were others: Brahe, Kepler, Bar and Regiomontanus. Kuhn painfully and illegitimately oversimplified a situation that was described so much more elegantly by Feyerabend. The idea of Copernicus as a lone genius turning the world upside down doesn't fit the historical, scientific or philosophical facts. Even if he wasn't just one of many working through an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process, the fact is that he wasn't investigating physics from scratch, he was putting forward a slightly different model of celestial mechanics using perfectly traditional tools combined with the increased accuracy made possible by better timekeeping and telescopes.

Apart from that...

Copernicus had telescopes?

ETA:

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance- and Reformation-era mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe, ... Wikipedia
Born: February 19, 1473, Toruń, Poland
Died: May 24, 1543, Frombork, Poland

The telescope is one of humankind's most important inventions. The simple device that made far away things look near gave observers a new perspective. When curious men pointed the spyglass toward the sky, our view of Earth and our place in the universe changed forever.

But who invented the telescope? The answer remains a mystery today. It is highly probable that as glassmaking and lens-grinding techniques improved in the late 1500s, someone held up two lenses and discovered what they could do.

The first person to apply for a patent for a telescope was a Dutch eyeglass maker named Hans Lippershey (or Lipperhey). In 1608, Lippershey tried to lay claim on a device with three-times magnification. His telescope had a concave eyepiece aligned with a convex objective lens. One story goes that he got the idea for his design after observing two children in his shop holding up two lenses that made a distant weather vane appear close. Others charged at the time that he stole the design from another eyeglass maker, Zacharias Jansen.

Jansen and Lippershey lived in the same town and both worked on making optical instruments. Scholars generally argue, however, that there is no real evidence that Lippershey did not develop his telescope independently. Lippershey, therefore, gets the credit for the telescope, because of the patent application, while Jansen is credited with inventing the compound microscope. Both appear to have contributed to the development of both instruments.

Compounding the confusion, yet another Dutchman, Jacob Metius, applied for a patent for a telescope a few weeks after Lippershey. The government of the Netherlands eventually turned down both applications because of the counterclaims. Also, officials said, the device was easy to reproduce, making it difficult to patent. In the end, Metius got a small reward, but the government paid Lippershey a handsome fee to make copies of his telescope.

Enter Galileo

In 1609, Galileo Galilei heard about the "Dutch perspective glasses" and within days had designed one of his own — without ever seeing one. He made some improvements on his initial design and presented his device to the Venetian Senate. The Senate, in turn, set him up for life as a lecturer at the University of Padua and doubled his salary, according to Stillman Drake in his book "Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography" (Courier Dover Publications, 2003).


Galileo was the first to point a telescope skyward. He was able to make out mountains and craters on the moon, as well as a ribbon of diffuse light arching across the sky — the Milky Way. He also discovered the sun had sunspots, and Jupiter had its own set of moons.

https://www.space.com/21950-who-invente ... scope.html[/QUOTE]

Ooops! Good catch. My fuckup wasn't the telescope, it was consistently writing 'Copernicus' when I meant 'Galileo'. Which is almost worse given that it was a reply to assertions about Galileo.

[BWE]

Lol, the anal amateur astronomer couldn't help himself.

[plebian]

I'm surprised you didn't catch that.

[subsymbolic]

[quote=""plebian""]I'm surprised you didn't catch that.[/quote]

Either because I use binoculars for stargazing or because I was too busy enjoying the view in a session of anal astronomy. Or was that you? it isn't clear? Probably light pollution from the sun I can see peeking from behind my sphincter.